DDT found in trout from Lake Chelan

Relatively small sample has state holding off issuing a warning

By ROBERT MCCLURE AND LISA STIFFLER, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, October 18, 2002

The banned pesticide DDT has been found at an extraordinarily high level in Lake Chelan trout, but authorities cautioned yesterday that it's too early to warn against eating fish caught there.

Lake Chelan's single test result -- reached by filleting five small trout, grinding the fillets in a blender and testing the composite -- was one out of tens of thousands of tests in an ongoing nationwide study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

So far, 143 lakes have been tested.

"The number of fish sampled is extremely small and the body of water is so large we don't feel like we have enough information to issue an advisory," said Dr. Jude Van Buren, the state Health Department's director of environmental health assessment.

The trout were gathered in 1999 near Wapato Point on the northeast shore of Lake Chelan, not far from where Stink Creek empties into the lake. Runoff from old orchards where DDT was sprayed in the middle of the last century has long been known to be a problem in the area.

DDT is stored in fatty tissue and can be passed to infants through breast milk. The pesticide affects the nervous system, causing seizures and tremors in large exposures. It's suspected the harm reproduction in animals.

People fishing in the Yakima River are advised by the Health Department to not eat more than one meal a week of mountain whitefish, common carp and all bottom fish because of DDT contamination. The recommendation was based on more extensive research than the recent EPA samples, a health official said.

It's even possible that the high DDT reading from Lake Chelan resulted from some sort of error in the lab.

"All of us are thinking we should go back to that lake" and test more fish, said Patricia Cirone, program manager at the risk-evaluation unit of EPA's Seattle-based Region 10. "I'm not surprised to find DDT. With such a tiny fish . . . it makes me suspect the sample. There's something not quite right to me."

Based on that one test, Cirone said, "I wouldn't cut my trout diet down. I would eat trout."

Starting in the 1940s, DDT was used for bug control. The compound accumulates in organisms as it moves up the food chain. It was linked to the decline of bald eagles, peregrine falcons and brown pelicans because it caused egg shells to thin, reducing the survival of chicks. The chemical was banned in 1972, but takes decades to break down once in the soil.

The level of DDT and its breakdown products in the trout caught near Stink Creek was 1,481 parts per billion. The amount of DDT measured in samples of Yakima River bottomfish was approximately 840 parts per billion.

The Chelan data comes from "just five trout," said Koenraad Marien, a Health Department toxicologist. "You really can't do a lot with five trout."

Van Buren said that her agency was meeting with the EPA next week to discuss additional testing.

A group of local citizens and government workers have been devising a plan to try to stem the flow of DDT into Lake Chelan and its tributaries, but that's a very difficult thing to do, said Joye Redfield-Wilder, a spokeswoman for the state Ecology Department.

"This is more information that shows this is an ongoing problem," she said. "It seems incredible to people that 20 or 30 years after DDT has been banned it remains in the environment, but it really isn't that surprising."